Davyn on being a Microsoft partner of the year during a pandemic

(Davyn's interview)

Microsoft's Partner of the Year 2021 is Davyn, a gold-level cloud platform certified company with a 20-year track record of providing technology solutions in TT.

The company first transitioned from 100 per cent on-premise deployments of software in 2001 to an embrace of cloud solutions in 2017. By 2020, the company was registering 59 per cent of its business from cloud solutions and expects that to grow when Dynamics 365 Business Central is available in the region as a cloud solution.

The other major transition began five years ago, according to Derrick Villenueve the company's director of strategy.

"Most of our work for the first 15 years was mainly in Trinidad and we're doing work regionally on an opportunistic basis," Villenueve said on a Teams conference call last week.

"We changed that business model five years ago, investing significantly in hiring sales staff and focusing our efforts regionally and that has paid off significantly for us."

"We do work in almost all the English speaking Caribbean islands and in Suriname, Guyana and Belize."

"A little more than half our business, maybe 60 per cent, is regional."

Davyn works with over 150 clients across the English and Dutch speaking Caribbean and holds more than 70 certifications in Microsoft business software tools.

The projects that won the company the coveted partner of the year spot were executed for the Belize Social Security Board, Antigua Social Security Board, Turks and Caicos Islands National Security Board and the Caribbean Development Bank using a range of tools from Microsoft, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Apps and Virtual Machines and VPNs deployed using Azure.

"It (the pandemic) has increased our business in some areas, and it's decreased our business in other areas," said Villenueve.

"Last year we didn't hit our sales targets, but we did okay despite the pandemic. We did work on government portals and work to use technology to overcome some of the covid problems."

"That helped, but then we do a lot of retail enterprise resource planning, developing systems for retail. We had projects that were placed on hold for months while they (businesses) were shut down during covid," he said.

"Things have picked up this year. We see companies investing again, those retail projects are happening again, so we do see some recovery happening."

"There has been a focus on other ways of reaching out to customers beyond stores, either mobile or online presence. E-commerce is something a lot of businesses have been investing in and (are) focused on," he said.

According to Claudia Monteiro, Partners and Small, Medium and Corporate Director, Microsoft Caribbean, "From a transformation perspective it (the pandemic) has worked like a catalyst."

"The transformation processes have accelerated in the business space at a pace we could not have imagined before. I do not believe that we will fall back to the (workplace) scenarios that we had prior to the pandemic."

"The other thing that has happened is that businesses, and governments in their role of servicing citizens, have been pushed to transform themselves and to provide services in a completely different way."

"Many companies that were not considering technology as part of their core, now they need to become a technology company. They need to be able to open those channels to allow digital to grow."

"The Caribbean is not an exception to that. We are seeing that acceleration in all the territories, with businesses becoming digital companies."

Just a few years ago, Villeneuve said, there was a lot of resistance to using cloud-based services in TT.

"Businesses in the Caribbean still have concerns around cloud (services), but a lot of it is based on misconceptions," he said.

"The cloud services provided by Microsoft have had a lot invested in them to ensure security and business continuity. In many cases in the Caribbean it's difficult to deploy services with that level of assurance of quality and security."

"Businesses will worry about the security of their data in the cloud, but the security of your data is dependent on the hardware it's placed on."

There are still good reasons to have things on premise in hybrid solutions and there is still some need for that. In addition, some companies have made investments in their on-premise infrastructure, so they will go through a migration that's going to happen over time.

Davyn's learning experiences in the region were also Microsoft's, Monteiro observed.

"Being able to deploy these projects in record time because there is real pressure to set up for end users has taught us a lot as a company about how to provide those services in a different way and being there (for support)," Monteiro said.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com.